The Yes California group has been around for more than two years, Evans said. It is based around California taxpayers paying more money to the federal government than the state receives in spending, that Californians are culturally different from the rest of the country, and that national media and organizations routinely criticize Californians for being out of step with the rest of the U.S.

Yeah, the best way to prove they’re not “out of step with the rest of the U.S.” is secession – that’ll do the trick! / sarc

On the bright side:
The rest of the country won’t have to stay up late on election night.

On the down side:
For a state to secede, the 49 other states must approve an amendment to the U. S. Constitution.

The Vatican and Argentina’s bishops have finished cataloguing their archives from the country’s “dirty war” and will soon make them available to victims and their relatives who have long accused church members of complicity with the military dictatorship. The 3,000 files being released, though, are a fraction of the documentation believed to be in the possession of the Argentine church.

A joint statement Tuesday by the Vatican and the Argentine bishops’ conference said the process of digitizing the archives had been completed and that procedures to access the information would be forthcoming. No date was set, and the opening for now is restricted to victims, detainees, their relatives and the religious superiors of victims who were priests or nuns.

Even as President Michel Temer struggles to assure investors that Brazil is politically stable, this month’s municipal elections show restless voters fed up with Brazil’s ruling class and willing to gamble on unconventional newcomers

He said that the action-oriented outcome document, known as the New Urban Agenda, enshrined now in the ‘Quito Declaration on Sustainable Cities and Human Settlements for All,’ should be seen as an extension of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, agreed by 193 Member States of the UN in September 2015.

Following a report in the Washington Post that the foundation raked in millions from foreign governments while Clinton was at the State Department, Clinton’s team discussed over email how to address questions about the Algeria donation from other outlets.

Government has announced plans to augment the Jamaica Defence Force (JDF) in western Jamaica in an effort to have speedier and more effective response to any violent upsurge in that section of the island

The State Department would not say how much the agency paid for the polling in Haiti. The polling firm, Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research, was paid nearly $4 million for political polling in the 2014 campaign cycle, almost entirely by Democrats, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Stan Greenberg, the research firm’s chairman and CEO, served as Clinton’s pollster during his 1992 run for president.

The latest revelations about the Cold War-era case come on the 40th anniversary of the assassination of Orlando Letelier, a leading opponent of the Pinochet regime and onetime Chilean foreign minister, and his think-tank colleague, Ronni Moffitt, in a car bomb on D.C.’s Embassy Row.

NICARAGUANicaragua rejects U.S. bill for loans with strings attached (emphasis added)The Nicaraguan government was responding to the Nicaraguan Investment Conditionality Act, a bill passed by the U.S. House of Representatives on Wednesday. A version was introduced by Senator Ted Cruz in the U.S. Senate earlier this month.

Nicaragua on Thursday criticized a proposal by U.S. lawmakers that would require the Central American country, which will hold elections in November, to make political changes in order to receive international loans.
. . .
The Nicaraguan government was responding to the Nicaraguan Investment Conditionality Act, a bill passed by the U.S. House of Representatives on Wednesday. A version was introduced by Senator Ted Cruz in the U.S. Senate earlier this month.

The bill proposes blocking Nicaragua from obtaining loans from international financial institutions unless the country “is taking effective steps to hold free, fair, and transparent elections.”

On Nov. 6, Nicaraguans will vote for president and 90 members of the National Assembly.

President Daniel Ortega is the favorite as he seeks his third consecutive term.

Budgets have been roughly in balance and public debt is low. The central bank aims for an inflation rate of 4.5% and usually gets close. Commercial banks are healthy (in part because they charge high interest rates and face little competition). Regulation, like the tax code, is business-friendly. Independent trade unions, suppressed under Stroessner, are weak.

“The Uruguayan government is doing everything possible,” Vazquez said. “But as I’ve said in the past: If the countries where the Syrian citizen wants to go don’t take him, we can’t do anything about it.”

The efforts to reopen the complaint filed by late AMIA special prosecutor Alberto Nisman against former president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner in January last year will continue this week with a hearing at an appeals court to determine if Federal Judge Daniel Rafecas had reason to deny such a petition from the DAIA Jewish community group last month.

In parallel, Federal Judge Claudio Bonadio has been making progress in an accusation of treason against Fernández de Kirchner and former foreign minister Héctor Timerman in relation to the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with Iran.

If you can’t make it to the event, you can watch it live online at www.cato.org/live and join the conversation on Twitter using #Brazillionaires. Follow @CatoEvents on Twitter to get future event updates, live streams, and videos from the Cato Institute.

Syrian native Abu Wa’el Dhiab has repeatedly said he is unhappy in Uruguay and is demanding he be allowed to leave the South American country, which took him in with five other former Guantanamo prisoners in 2014.
. . .
Although there’s nothing impeding Dhiab’s family from coming to Uruguay, the former prisoner is against it, Mirza said. “We’d have to ask ourselves why his family could not come to Uruguay when the families of other Guantanamo refugees came here when they wished.”
. . .
Dhiab also says that he feels like a prisoner in Uruguay.

When Clinton was secretary of state, donations from foreign governments to the Clinton Foundation correlated to large increases in weapons exports from the U.S. to the countries which donated. With Clinton’s help, Clinton Foundation donor Claudio Osorio won a $10 million loan in 2010 from the Overseas Private Investment Corporation meant to be used to build houses in Haiti. Corrupt Venezuelan banker Gonzalo Tirado hired Jonathan Mantz, a Clinton fundraiser, and made a donation to the Clinton Foundation in order to avoid being extradited to Venezuela.

Of the 117 bodies found, 17 could not be identified as they were either too badly decomposed or because they had been decapitated or were missing other body parts. Four of the 84 showing signs of having suffered violent deaths had bullet holes in their skulls.

Not only were taxpayers on the hook for the costs of bringing the government-funded nanny—even though she didn’t appear on one version of the flight manifest—but also thousands of dollars for Trudeau’s tour manager to tag along, even though it wasn’t an official trip of any kind.

Weeks before selling its first ounce of pot at pharmacies, International Cannabis Corp. is already betting that hemp – a variety of cannabis – will be a much bigger market than selling the psychoactive part of the plant, according to Chief Executive Officer Guillermo Delmonte. Hemp and its extracts can be used in food, cosmetics and medicine

The big all-over-the-world stupid story of the week: Ryan Lochte and three other swimmers got drunk and gave Brazilians an excuse to feign outrage over their country being embarrassed; I’m still waiting for the Brazilians to be embarrassed over the bodyparts washing on shore during the Olympics or over the six Brazilians a day who die at the hands of state security forces.

Meanwhile, a new word enters the lexicon, Iranophobia (emphasis added),

Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif will tour six Latin American countries next week to “foil the Iranophobia plots promoted by Israel,” the Islamic Republic’s semi-official state news agency Fars reported on Wednesday.
. . .
Zarif will be accompanied on his visit to Cuba, Nicaragua, Ecuador, Chile, Bolivia and Venezuela by a 60-member economic delegation.

The Santa Cruz academy was initially inaugurated in 2011 as the “ALBA School” after the now-weakened regional alliance that includes Venezuela, Nicaragua, Ecuador and Cuba.

Morales’s invitation to that event of then-Iranian defense minister Ahmad Vahidi provoked an uproar in neighboring Argentina, where judicial authorities have accused Vahidi of a role in the 1994 bombing of a Jewish community center that killed 85 people.

Brazil summoned Uruguay’s ambassador on Tuesday after the neighboring country’s foreign minister accused Brazil of trying to “buy” its vote to block Venezuela from taking the rotating presidency of the Mercosur trade bloc.

In comments to lawmakers last week that were made public on Tuesday, Uruguayan Foreign Minister Rodolfo Nin Novoa said his government was “angry” with Brazil’s attempt to prevent Caracas from leading the regional group that also includes Argentina and Paraguay.
. . .
Since Brazil’s President Dilma Rousseff was suspended in May, her replacement Michel Temer has moved the country away from leftist allies such as Venezuela and toward traditional allies the United States and Europe.

Argentina and Paraguay, once close allies to Caracas, have also moved to undermine Venezuela as the OPEC nation’s socialist government struggles with economic and political crises.